I need to convince my boss that LabVIEW is up to the task. Need help.

[SectorEffector]

Can LabVIEW do complex tool path computing for CNC machines (Computer-aided Manufacturing), for 3 or more axis with up to 8 digits after comma precision? Making data-sets of 10^6 to 10^9 coordinates, using most of the mathematical functions in the functions palette.

My boss asked me if I'm interested in doing a C++ cource, for doing just that. He thinks LabVIEW cannot do this, he is not a programmer and he is afraid that LabVIEW would take too long to calculate the result (too long being serveral hours).

How can I convince him that LabVIEW is capable of doing this? Are there any documents, case studies or papers that can confirm this. I searched the forum and the web, but did not found anything. I think this is because I'm not using the right key-words in my searches.

Kudos will be given 🙂

[Mark_Yedinak]

In my opinion LabVIEW would be up to the task. However on important thing to note is that you can write inefficient code in any language. I would venture to guess that if you wrote the C++ code (sounds like you don't have much experience in that arena) there would be more risk of writing inefficient code than in a language you have experience with. In addition, LabVIEW makes it easy to support parallel processing which can improve your performance. Parallel programming in C++ is non-trivial. LabVIEW is a fully compiled language and doesn't suffer from performance hits you get from interpretive script languages.

BTW, the problem you described doesn't sound very taxing on a well written LabVIEW application.

You may want to look at some of the videos of the demos from this year's NI Week. There were some extremely powerful applications that very doing some very heavy duty number cruntching and data acquision.

[soupy]

here at SpaceX we use labview for all of our launch and test systems. One of our telemetry applications receives, parses, scales and saves about 10k channels at the same time with room to grow. You shouldn't have any performance issues.

Tell your boss that it's good enough to launch rockets, so it should be good enough to calculate CNC paths.

http://www.spacex.com/

[yenknip]

All programming languages boil down to the same thing, so a project may as well be done in the environment you know best - or want to improve your knowledge of with a real project. 

LabVIEW case studies

The LHC at CERN uses LabVIEW and some NI hardware

Large telescope control system

Autonomous Robots 

As an aside, I doubt any mechanical readings with 8 digits of precision would have any meaningful accuracy beyond the 3rd digit; if that even.